


Always already tomorrow

by imaginationandheartbreak (alexgrey)



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: 1920s Berlin, F/F, F/M, Gun Kink, Poetry, River/Doctor AU Ficathon, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-05
Updated: 2013-11-05
Packaged: 2017-12-31 15:00:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1033054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexgrey/pseuds/imaginationandheartbreak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As a writer it was a bitter, happy curse to find her – his novel abandoned as she’d pulled hundreds of poems and stories out of him over the past five months and drove his feet to walk the Kurfürstendamm all the way to, let’s face it, a fairly marginal cabaret in a city rich with dozens of them. Half the nights here women-only anyway and he’d be forced at 6 to the Eldorado, where he’d mostly have to dodge men who liked his tweedy professor look, called him ‘Herr Doktor” as if he worked at the university, but mostly in jest and because they gently mocked his notebooks. His moderate affluence was often mistaken here for understated considerable wealth and, he was told, he had beautiful lips. Irresistible to all except the one he wanted.  He had cash, hard currency always in his pocket, and knew he would be welcome in any of the bars.  Much more than welcome – cocaine, lapdances … hell, contortionists in back arches, boys, girls: whatever cash wanted.  Séances, transvestite balls, more exotic specialties?  Everything possible.  Even the sharp wind, Berliner Luft, whispered ‘yes’ through the alleys of Berlin.  What he wanted, though, wasn’t for sale: River.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Always already tomorrow

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the River/Doctor AU Ficathon
> 
> For Ashley (jennalouisa): Hope you like it, Ashley. It kinda got away from me once the ether came into play. Sorry/not sorry :-) But I truly hope the piece doesn’t cross any of your lines. 
> 
> Prompt: “1920s Berlin. The Doctor is a writer and River sings at a local jazz club. He goes there every day and writes poems and stories about her. One day, she notices.”

He’s back again, of course, pulled inexorably along the _Kurfürstendamm_ to the small bar he now jokingly called his studio. How could he ever stay away?  He’d be lying if he said this wasn’t his favourite place to write in all Berlin. Late afternoon, heavy velvet window coverings, could be any time of the day or night - and the bar is all smoke and kissing in curved booths, sometimes in threes and fours, a dark cocoon of safety and possibility and risk and unfolding.  God: BERLIN!  But here is the real reason -  there – there she is … approaching the stage, already singing: louche, gorgeous, her dress backless, her eyes green and blue and dancing and haunted … River.

 

River’s there like a blue angel.  He says this in his head… but why a blue angel? Why does he think these things? He takes his notebook and writes down the words, quickly sketches River, too, in the margin, all curls and curves, to ward off forgetting and covers the sketch in swirling blue circles… writes ‘River’ underneath, the date: October 24th, 1928, the start of yet another poem. But he knows he won’t forget.  

 

And, oh, he’s even tried. Not very hard, mind you, but he’s tried: on his back on the cool sheets of his small bed, iron frame, one good south window, always too cold as September approaches, no real heat, and he can’t even get up for another blanket, pinned as he is to the bed by the weight of _visions_ of her:  strawberry-blonde curls, untamed, delicate hands, wild heart, her voice low and promising. But never directed toward him. He tries to get her out of his head - pointless.  He can’t do it, and he reaches under the thin blanket to stroke himself, thinking of her siren’s lips and letting out a low moan: _River_.

 

Some days he just sits and stares; can barely make a poem.   She sings, often to the girls in front. It’s mostly the women paying the tabs in this bar, and he feels desire pulse like nowhere in his childhood: the heartbeats of the city are strange, fantastic, would make his growing-up home melt down and go critical.

 

River kissed freely, but never his lips – mostly other girls from the show, but one or two special girls, too.  As a writer his curse is to look and really see.  Her fingers lightly touching some girl’s shoulder but burning in their intensity, the girl underneath River’s fingers already shuddering, arching into possibility and River’s smile then – oh her knowing smile – happy with this game she’s already won, low chuckle escaping.  She’s a bit predatory, he decides – he shouldn’t like that, he thinks – kinda does, a bit.  LOOK AT ME, RIVER. But she never does.  Not really. He’s been here most every day for months, drinking her in, mesmerized by her singing: now slow and sexy and world-building, now fast and lighthearted and flirtatious but with an undercurrent of something so permanent, so foundational, so integral to his heart he once left his seat in the front circle and went to the toilet to cry.  He follows her with her eyes to the backstage spaces – not hard in this small cabaret - watching her softly chewing chloroform-soaked rose petals, or stirring them in bowls of ether, and he writes poems that alternate between wondering about her dreams and her escape plans, her breasts and her heart. He writes stories about her set in all time periods; poems in which he finally fucks her (sometime River and her lovers, but that’s only in deference to her… he only cares about her eyes; her song); abstract poems about freedom and want; poems that are nothing but tears; domestic poems about his fantasy future home with River in the country; a poem of holding her hand in his and escaping. Together. That poem recurs. She is magnificent.

 

As a writer it was a bitter, happy curse to find her – his novel abandoned as she’d pulled hundreds of poems and stories out of him over the past five months and drove his feet to walk the _Kurfürstendamm_ all the way to, let’s face it, a fairly marginal cabaret in a city rich with dozens of them. Half the nights here women-only anyway and he’d be forced at 6 to the Eldorado, where he’d mostly have to dodge men who liked his tweedy professor look, called him ‘Herr Doktor” as if he worked at the university, but mostly in jest and because they gently mocked his notebooks. His moderate affluence was often mistaken here for understated considerable wealth and, he was told, he had beautiful lips. Irresistible to all except the one he wanted.  He had cash, hard currency always in his pocket, and knew he would be welcome in any of the bars.  Much more than welcome – cocaine, lapdances … hell, contortionists in back arches, boys, girls: whatever cash wanted.  Séances, transvestite balls, more exotic specialties?  Everything possible.  Even the sharp wind, _Berliner Luft,_ whispered ‘yes’ through the alleys of Berlin.  What he wanted, though, wasn’t for sale: River.

 

This cabaret had River and that’s all that really mattered.  And he hadn’t figured out why, not really, and the puzzle of it drove him and mocked him as much as it inspired him: who are you, River?

 

It’s like this: he looks at River and he sees himself, like he’s already done this, like she already loves him, his face between her thighs, tongue melting into her:  
  
 _The centre of this girl_  
 _And the centre of him_  
 _Burning up a universe._

  
Oh, River.  Who are you, really? And, yes, she scares him a bit, when he looks at her – blue-green eyes, those gently rising breasts when she sings, her voice not even of this century.  That’s the thing: both of them with voices out of time.  It’s less lonely with her in the world. She seems older than him… wiser… just maybe.  But it’s funny - although she makes him shy, for the first time in his life he feels the pull of someone equal.  They say she mixes juice from the yohimbé bush into her lipstick and, oh, he believes it: her lovers saucer-eyed and delirious.  To be a melody on those lips... to be kissed by them. For the first time he is prepared to succumb.

 

She draws poems out of him he didn’t know were possible. They are not anything he knew before he saw her. He writes in his notebooks and when they fill he writes on napkins, the words pouring and dirty and in an English that does not yet exist. This week’s variation: His poems are increasingly of stars; constellations: desire, bright lights, the curve of River’s shoulder.  In his poem his tongue traces along the estuaries of her body and makes her scream.  She is the Andromeda galaxy; she is a whore he takes without words outside against a rough wall; she is once again the singer he is utterly in love with, kneeling in front of him, greedily taking him into a hot mouth; she is the end of all fucking poetry. In reality, he heads home to his pretty shabby room and dreams of her, his hand on his cock, helpless in the face of fantasy River: she is a machine. She is safety. She is the future. She is the next world war.

 

He blushes imagining the what ifs – what if she saw these poems one day?  That story where he marries her over and over? Knew that in his heart he wanted every song to be for him? Oh, she knows that last bit: it takes energy not to meet the gaze of someone who has been sitting worshipping you from the front row for months. Sometimes that energy rolls off her in waves.

 

His writing is becoming crazier. From the moment he’d met her, he’d been thrown deliciously off-balance:  “who are you?” he’d asked early on, when he’d only been coming here a week and didn’t know better, was bold instead of deferential, but sitting even then at the front table to fall under her spell. 

 

“What kind of a question is that?” she’d replied, dismissively.

 

Here was the pattern: he’d wait a half hour, watch her for her ten or fifteen minute set, then, when River had left he stage, he’d stare blankly after her and then, when he could no longer see her in the shadows _write._   Poems poured of him. For her.

 

*

He writes of stars  
The milky way  
He writes long poems about River falling to pieces under a poetic rival’s artful tongue  
Her lover lovely, bobbed hair, young, entranced, breasts aching under River’s touch  
And he seethes  
Oh, Berlin  
There are no limits to his writing, to his fantasies

 

Berlin gives such incredible permission: what could you imagine if you were not afraid? What could you write if your mind wasn’t utterly colonized by your century?  
All your portraits, he writes, your fucking instagrams (what’s an instagram?) all look the same. Trapped in your time.  
If you can’t even begin to think outside your universe, you need to be in Berlin, 1928, watching River.

River is a cypher.  
River is a portal.

*

And the things he sees,  
At night  
Thinking of her  
The words that form on his pen,  
New.

He imagines forests and planets and animals that don’t exist  
So beyond the handful in his boyhood books  
Writes poems of River  
Across stars  
With his tongue  
His cock  
Outstretched hands  
In a language yet to be invented

 

*

He says the Eldorado’s not his scene  
And it doesn’t sound like anything anyone says this century  
Poetry is cool, he says in his head  
And in moments like this he feels, really feels, like he invents language out of time  
His London literary agent applauds this. He used to, too, but now it makes him desperately uneasy, not seeing the world the way his contemporaries see it  
Words they never say on his lips.

 

One day he realizes he speaks a lot of languages but doesn’t remembered learning them. He sits in the popular bar, the one on Unter den Linden 77, almost an entire day nursing drinks and writing a letter to River about it that would never be sent.  She would know what it meant.

 

*

His next poem is entirely concrete  
He draws the words in the shape of her cunt  
They fan out  
And retreat  
And he talks about how much he needs to taste her  
The next time he sees her it’s techtonic.  
The ground shifts and he melts  
Into it  
And drinks her  
Oh, River

 

*

Now he writes a piece  
Entirely about her skin. The way it burns him  
The way he needs it  
It could never be published, he knows.  
It’s more romantic than sexual.  
He tries to put more distance between him and the subject; her wild hair  
And hips  
But fails utterly  
The poem continues with him holding her hand  
Panting and begging into her shoulder  
Enough! He screams but keeps writing  
And in his dreams the bombs drop overhead  
And whole planets spin out of orbit  
And his poems make no sense anymore

 

Only some of the poems say what he would do to her, with her, what he would make her say into the night if she were ever in his bed and what he would say back:

-       _oh, fuck, more, need you, only only you, own me –_

_only you, however you need me, want beyond want, until forever, this lifetime not containing us, come for me, now, mine, us  –_

 

He wants her submissive, fucking her mouth to the fading beats of the band. He wants her on top, tying his wrists and parading him, hers, as the lights close, Saturdays, in the cabarets.

 

*

River always looked past him. But Ursula, River’s sometime-lover, was kind:

“I know how she is.  And you really mustn’t.  She’s not like anyone here – she’s fringe - and that’s really saying something in Berlin,” she laughed. “You seem lovely,” she said, then, lifting her leg to straddle his lap, hitching her short skirt up and taking his hands to place them on her bare back, her top a sultry, form-fitting cut-out. He held her there half-heartedly and she moved her fingers gently through his long brown hair, then, along his narrow face, finally holding it and staring at him like she was looking at a painting.  

 

“Ursula…” he began. 

 

Oh, don’t worry, Doktor…  I know… “ her voice sounded sad, her eyes were deceptively merry.  Talented girl.  We’re all too hurt, he thinks.  And he sees River, then, just beyond the stage, watching them. 

 

“Shit,” he whispers and Ursula almost jumps off his lap.

 

“Sorry!” he hisses.  And that was the last time he said a word to River.

 

*

 

1929 and he sees a shooting poster for a movie - the Blue Angel. His blue angel.  He pulls out the notebook.  Yes, there it is. Had he imagined it into existence or had it already been there all the time?  Maybe he has already descended into cocaine and chloroform without knowing it – it happens to people here in Berlin. They arrive as lawyers and doctors and painters and they leave naked and bruised and _alive_ , weeks, months, sometimes years thick with lovers and art and dancing and thieves.  When they beg friends or distant parents or landlords for money and head for the train to take them back to New York or Edinburgh or Duluth they carry a layer of poetry on their bodies forever and try to shake their heads free of the dreamscape. Lucky.

 

He knows the wind is shifting. That writer’s curse, remember?  He wakes up one morning, bitter coffee, newspapers filled with menace.  He knows it will grow like spilling shadows at midnight: RUN.

 

He leaves a single note in her dressing room, using the special paper he’d brought from home.  ‘Too good to use,’ he hears his mother’s voice.  It’s true – there is something so sensuous about that paper that he can’t bear to write on it.  Saving it for an incredibly special poem.  He may not have it in him, though.  He wants her to hold it.  Besides, why would he hold anything back from her?  He writes simply: ‘River, I suspect you know everything I write is for you. All this time? All those songs?  I can’t leave Berlin without talking properly at least once.  Please River. I am begging you. You know me. Please.’ It only turns into another poem, shifting and dancing across he surface of the paper like ink on a sea of water instead of trapped on the page.  

 

*

She’s waiting for him. And he doesn’t come. And, oh, she wants. That night, in the changing room, she drives three fingers into her cunt and sees those other-worldly fucking eyes. And begs him to take her with him as she comes.

*

 

Saturday night

He wears a purple jacket, long, split tails

Tries not to meet her gaze

She hasn’t replied to his note

 

*

River drinks.  She drinks backstage and imagines the whole audience blown to pieces.  When she sings, she sings to the stars.  Everyone gone.  No one she talks to ever seems to feel this way.  The lovely, accommodating girl in her lap now licking her tongue over and over again along River’s throat is not at all disturbed.  River used to think about nothing but fun, too, but her centre of gravity has shifted.  Techtonic plates. Kisses the girl.  Hungrily. But her hunger isn’t for poor Ursula. It’s for that odd man in the front row she knows so intimately from her dreams.  The one who KNOWS HER and has put her into stories. Oh, she’s seen them. Ursula has brought them to her without him even noticing. And then the note. The note that is different but just as true and beautiful every time she reads it. Poems about her dreams. Poems about the two of them, beyond intimacy. How does he know those things?  He is like gravity. So she drinks.

 

Have you ever had a hunger you couldn’t satisfy because it had no name? No shape? River just _needs_.  _‘Shh, River, keep the empty spaces to yourself,’_ she admonishes.   Berlin had seemed so vast and when she first got here and for a while she no longer ached.  But that emptiness was stirring again, bigger than any city.  The drumming of the coming dangers. Her heart was already mobilizing and some crazy, crazy part of her wouldn’t even miss the cabaret, her time on stage, the songs. River tried to push the feeling down, ignore it… but she knew: the drumming beat of danger coming, just around the corner, ready to run. It made her heart soar, just a bit.  Adventure. Home.

 

These dreams will kill you, River.

These poems will save you, Doktor.

 

*

River finishes her song and looks at him, eyes level and searching and gorgeous. Wait -- she can SEE him, really see him, and it takes his breath away. Instead of taking the small set of stairs of the back of the stage, she takes the front set, and she’s standing at his table like he has willed her to do a million times.  Here she is.

 

 “I read your poem. It was beautiful.”

 

“Which one?”

 

“The thing is, every time I read it, it is a different poem. Sometimes in a language I’ve never even seen.  But I know it. And –" she averts her eyes and it should seem timid, but the gesture is daring:  follow me – “I can _read_ it,” she gloats, under her breath. “It was easier before you left me a million poems.” It’s a matter-of-fact voice. He can’t even decide if she’s thrilled or saddened.  Then, softer: “But not better. Come backstage after the last show.” There has never been a hotter voice. There have never been six words before that could upturn the world.

 

“Who ARE YOU, River?” 

 

But she’s already back on stage.

 

*

River is in the changeroom backstage, worn wood, dirty bulbs, silk dressing gown with fringe over pink silk panties, waiting for a knock.

 

On the other side of the door, the knock comes.  The Doktor moves his head side to side and runs his fingers through thick chestnut hair and breathes out, then pulls himself up to his full height and smiles, ready. If there is only going to be one night backstage, he isn’t going to let her down.

 

And so, incredibly, he is not at all nervous, now, as she unlocks the door, in an instant turned from the Doktor full of poems to the Doktor full of want and an odd, deep competence.

 

“Have you been with a lot of men, River?” he asks, cheekily and entirely out of character as he steps over the threshold. Berlin still hasn’t generally loosened his lips like that, only his pen, but something about this moment…

 

“No,” she says, her eyes utterly level with his. “None,” she replies, her right hand slightly behind her resting on a small vanity table draped with scarves and beads. He sees white petals floating in a bowl of ether to her left and under her hand…Oh, River:  a gun.

 

“A gun, River? Really?” he doesn’t even know why he sounds annoyed.

 

“It’s Berlin, Darling,” she says, not at all apologetic and he thinks maybe she should be since she’s entirely capable of shooting him now, close range.

 

“Do you know how to use it?”

 

He’s rewarded with one of River’s gorgeous laughs.

 

“Oh, Doktor…”

 

He doesn’t know what makes him brave, what makes him do what he does next, but he closes the space between them and puts his hand on her gun hand and gently closes it around the pistol, holds her hand with the gun in his large left hand and looks into her eyes, reaches behind her to the ether and pulls out petals and before he can think he is placing them at the edge of her lips and she’s parting them for him and letting him place them on her tongue. He reaches back for more and puts them in his own mouth. Interesting. Not instant. Anticipatory. They are barely moving and he gently coaxes the gun from River, holding it now like an alien artefact in his own hand.

 

“Oh, River, you’re not at all like the other girls, are you?” It’s not a question, it’s a growl.

 

He boldly moves the barrel of the gun then, to stroke her clit through the silk of her underwear, gently, up and down. And she gasps but does not move. If anything, he thinks she parts her legs just a tiny bit, but he could be imagining that, wishing that, or fooled by the ether.

 

“Tomorrow, River, tomorrow this will be me if you open that door.” It’s a promise. It’s a certainty.

 

Light flashes then behind his eyes and he just _knows_ they’ve done this before; what River likes. He catches her eyes and doesn’t see shock, but relief.

 

“This isn’t our first time, then,” he ventures.

 

“How?” She gasps, for the first time looking thrown.

 

And his heart thrills at the mystery, and this woman, and his head pounds from ether and he recklessly pulls her underwear to the side and brings the barrel of the gun to her moist opening and slides it in to the hilt, beginning a rhythmic thrusting.

 

“Tell me, River, is this what we like?” He’s rewarded with a breathy moan.

 

“Can’t say.”

 

He speeds up.

 

“Like this, River?”

 

“We like lots of things,” she confesses. The thing is, she thought they were dreams.

 

He’s never even held a gun before. Is it loaded? It’s River: oh, it’s loaded. Her hands are clutching at his shoulders now – she’s holding him. He wants her to let him hold her, though, with something other than this gun, but she’s like a wild animal and he doesn’t want to corner her.

 

“Tomorrow, River, tomorrow you open that door and leave the gun on the table and let me _in_ –,” he drives the barrel deeper into her cunt on that last word and she’s moaning loudly now, a Berliner’s “yes”, her sounds possibly travelling even to the cabaret stage and soon he feels her body shudder and, finally, she looks up at him with dreamy, demanding eyes and puts her hand on his wrist and together they pull the gun from her cunt and, in tandem, bring it to her lips:

 

“This is you,” River says simply, swallowing the gun deep into her throat.

 

He watches her for long dirty moments full of thrill and relief and an impossible, pulsing ache before crushing his body against hers, before moving her gun hand slowly from her mouth and kissing her beyond fiercely, tasting metal and ether and fate.

 

He’s being allowed in for the first time, but it’s SO familiar, her skin warm and already his. And it’s not at all the kind of thing an Englishman does, but this is Berlin, a different planet, and he drops to his knees, then, grabbing her ankle and kissing along her strong calf. He doesn’t care if he’s kissing across a million kisses. He likes her used, loves the taste of those legs that have kicked with abandon, and with rage. He can feel them haunted by a need to flee, his tongue burning now along the back of her knee. And it’s insane, just crazy, this isn’t who is IS who he thought he was before River, but he is CRYING, crying hot tears along this woman’s leg. He can barely speak and can’t look up:

 

“Could you sing for me, River?” he sobs.

 

And she tries, a half-remembered lullaby from his childhood but it’s mostly a shudder of want. Wait - his childhood? That’s a language no longer spoken. Oh, God, his heart.

 

He feels so clean and when he opens his mouth the words are unspeakably dirty and he pulls himself up again to whisper them to her ear.

 

He grabs her by the hips and wants to drive himself into her right there. But the Englishman in him – or is it the poet? – or something else? - means that he meets her eyes and waits for her to say yes.

 

“Is it tomorrow yet, River?”

 

“It’s always tomorrow, Doktor,” she hisses, kicking the pink silk to the ground and standing naked now in front of him.  She is timeless.  She is a Jewish girl utterly rooted in time.  Unless he grabs her hand now and they RUN.  When he reaches for it, her answering grip is forever.

 

“If you fuck me now, Doktor, I will never NEVER let you go. And that is a warning.”

 

And he is already inside her.

 


End file.
